Rambling and Reading

 I've had a long and mostly-not-working week - two sick days and then a three-day weekend for Columbus Day (which really should be First Nations Day, but I don't think our governor would go for that).

So I was hoping to get some gaming in. I did join in the Virtual Wargames Club meeting on Saturday, getting to see some of the group's recent collections and showing off some of my own pictures of Kodiak. At the same time was a round of De Bellis Antiquitatis at the club, which has made it somewhat busier; but I chose the option which meant I could stay home.

The first half of the Seven Days to the River Rhine game is now available on Youtube, thanks to Oriskany Jim:

I was then going to try a round of the solo game Battles of the English Civil War by Mike Lambo. I even gave up on cutting out half-sized Paperboys and enlarged the first scenario map instead to fit my Wofun plastics. But while I've read the rules over, I haven't had the gumption to break out the minis and start playing. (One issue that makes it easy to procrastinate is that the lighting in my apartment is such that there aren't many places to play where the lights are directly overhead, hence the poor photos.)

Instead, I've been reading.

This week it has been primarily the old classic Time-Life Civil War series. I love Time-Life books for their compact style and wealth of art and photos; I own most of the Aviation and WWII series, but the ACW series was one I never did manage to get hold of beyond the first volume. So instead I started reading it online, on archive.org. Each book is 175 pages long, but with crisp text and a high proportion of images, so in the past weekend alone I've flashed through about six volumes - I'm currently up to volume eight, The Coastal War: Chesapeake Bay to Rio Grande. And becoming more interested in running something from the Civil War at work - my Battery Wagner model has seen no use yet and (having been stacked in a crowded office) isn't in the best condition. Though I may be able to get away with claiming it's been bombarded?

Others I've been reading are The History of the Lord of the Rings (available on Scribd, just started volume three) and A History of Warfare by John Keegan, a fine writer but a somewhat eclectic work. It's good, but strictly speaking it's not quite a history, as it's not entirely in order. It is loosely separated into sections on Stone, Flesh, Iron and Fire, but (for example) the section on Stone Age warfare is interspersed with comments on psychology, archaeology and anthropological studies of the Yanomamo, Easter Island, and Maori peoples, and what we might learn of prehistorical warfare from them. It's more a sociological history than anything else - why and how do we go to war? One writer regularly mentioned is Victor Hanson, whose controversial claim in The Western Way of War is that "western" peoples fight more deliberately than the "primitives" who (like the tribes of New Guinea) tend towards ritualistic and largely bloodless posturing. Yet you see that in Western literature like the Trojan War, so...

Still plenty to think about.